Tuesday, September 7, 2010

GoodBloodyHell

I am running the real risk of turning into one of those people who can only talk about how fucking stressed she is.

I hate that shit.

I'm fucking stressed.

Wedding bullshit takes a ton out of you. Especially when you've got lots of people on your ass about it. This has its excellent points, because it means I have less to do all by my lonesome. It also means that I've got a legion of folk to answer to.

Sigh. Poor ol' me.

Yeah, I know these ain't real problems.

All that aside, I've become mildly obsessed with the "mosque" at the "WTC site" I've had a share of heated conversations on the subject, and been called a unpatriotic (meh, there are worse things), a bad catholic (um, was I one to begin with?), and an idiot (that one bothered me, but at least they didn't say "not funny").

My take, in short:

This country was built on freedom of religion. Not "freedom of the religions that we think are ok.

Weather or not you happen to agree with the Islamic Cultural Center and its message/location...weather or not you think it's tacky/rude/tasteless for the building to go up in that particular place, they're legally allowed to build where they want.

Contrary to what many may think, in NYC, you can't just haphazardly build giant buildings just anywhere, and just because you think it would piss a bunch of people off. This is an interesting NY Magazine article about the real estate side of it.

MUSLIM, ISLAM equals the same thing as Al Quaeda. (That should read as "does not mean the same thing as." I just wanted to play around with the strikethrough thingy.) Just like all Christians don't want to blow up abortion clinics, and all Germans are not Nazis, etc.

Here's where I have to depart from my regular cynical, snarky self, and say that I do not, for one second, have anything less than a GIANT amount of respect, sadness, and heart for every single 9/11 victim, their families, and their friends. I will NEVER understand how it must feel to be a family so directly affected by this, and the fact that the 9/11 memorial site has NOT BEEN BUILT YET 10 years later is inexcusable to me. I feel similarly to how I feel when I think about how this country let it's folks down on 8/29/05. This has nothing to do with my sympathy for any of that. If anything, I think that this is an opportunity to work on making some mutual peace.